3 The Furness Memorial Library
Daniel Traister
In memory of William E. Miller (1910-1994), Assistant Curator, Furness Memorial Library
ilmarth S. Lewis, the great Horace Walpole collector, W once quipped that, if use were the criterion by which people judged the quality of libraries, we should judge that library to be the best which had the largest collection of telephone books. The Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library, now part of the Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania, has never needed to justify itself by denigrating “mere” use in favor of qual- ity and importance of collections. Over the years of its existence, it has always been among the most heavily used of Penn’s special collections (and this without even one telephone book in sight). The quality of its collections has never been in doubt, either. Its use is in part a reflection, obviously enough, of the drawing power of William Shakespeare. The Furnesses, father and son, based the collection on Shakespeare’s works and his stage and print career. Around these same topics their successors have continued to build it. The Furnesses’ chosen author has surely elicited more editions of and words about himself than any other writer in English—more, perhaps, than any other writer in the world. His continuing preeminence at all levels of education, and the popularity of Shakespearian productions on stage and screen, are evidence of an enthusiasm so widespread that it cannot be written off as merely academic. More than three hundred and fifty years after his death, Shakespeare continues to be box office. The collection’s use, then, must be at least partly a tribute to the writer with whom it is concerned. But credit must also go to the scholars and collectors who built it before passing their library to the stewardship of the University of Pennsylvania in 1931. Horace Howard Furness, Sr. (1833-1912), and his son, Horace Howard Furness, Jr. (1865-1930), collected for use and not for “envious Opposite page: Horace Howard Fur- show” (in the words of Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson). ness, Sr., in his library at Lin- Their library, which would become one of the most remarkable denshade, Wallingford, Pennsylvania (after 1894). research and teaching resources of the University, originated in the
62 THE PENN LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AT 250
needs of their own scholarly work. The collection was intended from the start to have a research function.1 1 See, most recently, Michael D. The Furnesses and their library emerged from a tradition of Bristol, in Shakespeare’s America, study that distinguishes them from a rather different, though America’s Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 65: “The concurrent, tradition of collecting, represented by such of their Shakespeare collection . . . [Furness near contemporaries among library builders as James Lenox, John Sr.] had in mind was to be a Carter Brown, or J. Pierpont Morgan. Furness Sr. began his collec- working library, rather than an ac- tion as a means of serving his own work on the history of the cumulation of rare objects.” Just transmission and interpretation of Shakespearian texts. The collec- about everyone else who has writ- ten about the Furness Library says tion originated in a notion of the library in service to the ends the same thing. The topic is even of private scholarship. The scholarship might be of public benefit, addressed by Furness himself, albeit but the library, unlike those formed by Lenox, Carter Brown, indirectly, in a letter of 13 Novem- or Morgan, did not at its inception envisage, even implicitly, any ber 1890 to University of Pennsyl- vania Provost William Pepper. Fur- eventual public role. ness is replying to Pepper’s query The Furness collection also reflected the tensions of an era of about “the cost of a good working massive social change. Many different people, for various reasons library of English and American and on both sides of the Atlantic, made of Shakespeare an icon Literature.” He writes: “I do not around which various conceptions of Anglo-Saxon nationhood here include any fictitiously valuable books, such as the Mazarin [i.e., might cohere. At the same time, the collection represented an at- Gutenberg] Bible or the First Folio tempt to recuperate Shakespeare from the taint (as it might have of Shakespeare, . . . [but] enumerate seemed in the Furnesses’ era) of the overly demotic and popular. only those classes of books, which Its scholarly aspirations simultaneously served the collectors’ own would be indispensable to the students in writing their college scholarly interests while also helping to return Shakespeare to Themes or in laying the funda- the hands of those they considered intellectually and socially mental groundwork of a sound capable of apprehending him. But perhaps the most significant English education” (The Letters of element that determined the nature of their collection was the Horace Howard Furness, ed. Horace Furnesses themselves. Howard Furness Jayne, 2 vols. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912], The collection that Horace Howard Furness, Sr., began to I:264-265 [emphasis added]). create emerges directly from the broad context of Victorian ap- proaches to Shakespeare. One student of these approaches, Aron Y. Stavisky, has described Victorian Shakespearian scholarship as founded on “two principles of . . . [the] age: the sense of progres- sive order, and an intense moral purpose.”2 Stavisky shows how 2 Aron Y. Stavisky, Shakespeare and “habits of industry and cooperative organization affected scholarly the Victorians: Roots of Modern Criti- production” in the nineteenth century. He is quite explicit that cism (Norman: University of Okla- homa Press, 1969), p. 4. Shakespearian scholarship is not immune from these processes, which he calls “the industrialization of Shakespeare studies”3: “Most of this work was characteristically unglamorous but neces- 3 So commonplace has talk of sary, each fact adding to the mosaic of historical perspective upon “the Shakespeare industry” become which our own [twentieth] century prizes itself.”4 The Furness that it must be said explicitly that Stavisky does not mean his collection emerges from a context in which “a scientific habit and words to be taken as mere meta- a theory of methodology [were both] applied to Shakespearean phor. Compare, e.g., L. C. Knights studies.”5 Their combination produced a scholarship, as A. W. THE FURNESS MEMORIAL LIBRARY 63
Ward remarked in summarizing the contributions of nineteenth- in Explorations: Essays in Criticism century Shakespeare studies generally, “chiefly concerned with Mainly on the Literature of the Seven- the elucidation and restoration of . . . [Shakespeare’s] text, the teenth Century (1946; rpt. London: Chatto and Windus, 1963): In the explanation and illustration of his matter, and the history of all nineteenth century, according to that entered into or surrounded his life and literary career.”6 Knights, “Shakespeare scholarship The Furness contribution to the Victorian Shakespearian enter- progressed by accumulation rather prise was the creation of a New Variorum Shakespeare, an effort than by a process of growth or clearly akin to other “industrial” or “scientific” literary and hu- development from a centre. It be- came a heavy industry” (p. 79). manistic projects of the era. Exemplary of such projects, according Knights objects to “new co-op- to Stavisky, was the notion put forth by another Victorian Shake- erative methods” of scholarship, spearian, F. G. Fleay, who “insisted that the way to understand which he finds “depressing,” pre- what Shakespeare meant was through the exhaustive tabulation cisely because they are “industrial” products of mass sensibilities rather of what his contemporaries meant by the same or analogous than “critical” products of well- 7 terms.” Although the Furnesses did not tabulate in this manner, honed individual sensibilities. the materials they gathered would have assisted the realization of many of Fleay’s ends, as well as their own. Murray’s great effort to create the New English Dictionary (now known as the 4 Stavisky, pp. 23-24. Oxford English Dictionary, or OED), and such projects as the Dictionary of National Biography and the ninth edition of the 5 Ibid., p. 47. Encyclopaedia Britannica, all arose from similar intellectual outlooks and “industrial” scholarly work habits. The Furnesses’ variorum 6 Adolphus William Ward, A History edition of Shakespeare’s works, like those other great monuments of English Dramatic Literature to the of Victorian scholarship, is rooted in a commitment to the good Death of Queen Anne, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1899), that can emerge only from a cumulative, rational methodology. 1:569 (quoted in Stavisky, p. 48). That methodology itself is founded on the bedrock conviction that scholarship and knowledge are cumulatively augmented. OED reminds us that a “variorum, sb.” is “an edition, esp. of 7 Stavisky, p. 76. the complete works of a classical author, containing the notes of various commentators or editors. . . . Used, chiefly attrib., to denote an edition, usu. of an author’s complete works, contain- ing variant readings from manuscripts or earlier editions.”8 Fur- 8 OED 1a-d. ness Sr. conceived his own variorum as a gathering together of what had already been discovered, thought, and said about individual acts, scenes, lines, and words; their historical and allusive backgrounds; and any other issues necessary for an understanding of the Shakespearian text. All these materials would then be printed, in excerpts and digested form, in the variorum volume, as extensive notes to the plays and poems. Its readers would be enabled to survey, at a glance, all they needed in order to grasp the difficulties of the text before their eyes. They could find the vari- ous resolutions of those difficulties already achieved or proposed by their predecessors. They might then build progressively on the labors of the past. This was the project, begun by Furness 64 THE PENN LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AT 250
Sr., that Furness Jr. joined, first as his father’s co-editor and later 9 Two studies of how “Shake- as his successor. It is the same project that the New Variorum’s speare” has been appropriated for heir, the Modern Language Association of America, continues to social, cultural, and even political purposes are Jonathan Bate, Shake- this day. spearean Constitutions: Politics, The- Why should the money and energy of Furness Sr. and Jr. have atre, Criticism 1730-1830 (Oxford: concentrated upon Shakespeare? Shakespeare’s intrinsic merits Clarendon Press, 1989), and Alan may justify his study under any circumstances but, in addition, Sinfield, “Give an account of commentators had begun to link several important social and Shakespeare and Education, show- ing why you think they are effec- cultural issues to Shakespeare as early as the eighteenth century. tive and what you have appreciated These remained significant throughout much of the nineteenth about them. Support your com- century. Indeed, they have by no means been resolved yet ments with precise references,” in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cul- (and have recently come to be much studied).9 The Furnesses tural Materialism, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, could hardly have remained uninfluenced by the largely English N.Y.: Cornell University Press, context in which work on Shakespeare in their era mainly 1994), pp. 158-181. More specifi- progressed. In addition, however, their American context posed cally, see Terence Hawkes, “Swisser- them analogous issues. In nineteenth-century America, as in Swatter: Making a Man of English Great Britain, once settled locations of social and cultural author- Letters,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis, New Accents ity felt increasingly threatened. The absorption into the body (London: Methuen, 1985): p. 30: politic of ever more numerous and “different” immigrant popu- “in England . . . in the late nine- lations seemed as bitter a pill for older American élites to swallow teenth and early twentieth cen- as extension of the franchise to the lower orders seemed in turies, particularly in that period which followed the second Re- Great Britain. Thus, in the United States, work that perpetuated form Bill of 1867[, t]he extension and reinforced a long-standing valorization of English culture of the franchise was a disturbing seemed also to perpetuate and reinforce the cultural leadership of prospect, a massive ‘leap in the this nation’s increasingly beleaguered “Anglo-Saxon” population. dark’. To meet it implied an equally German, Irish, and southern and eastern European immigrant massive effort of incorporation, in- clusion, and accommodation; of as- populations, many of them Roman Catholic or Jewish, were serted continuity and of willed co- thought to lack, among other important virtues, Anglo-Saxon herence in the name of national notions of freedom and self-government. Thus they needed ac- cultural identity. . . . Education culturation just as much as, if not more than, Britain’s own [w]as an obvious means by which English Prosperos might domesti- 10 hitherto unfranchised populations. cate their own Calibans. . . . It was Shakespeare proved as useful a tool for such purposes in a revolution, so to speak, by letters. this country as he did in Great Britain. Furness Sr. mentions . . . [T]he enshrining, embalming Shakespeare specifically in a letter of 2 May 1886. Extolling and even the prophylaxis of the the benefits of an English education in Philadelphia’s secondary national culture took the form so often of monumental literary un- schools, he speaks of “our own strong, sturdy English”: “into dertakings whose purpose was the that language we should be grateful that we were born; we live creation, reinforcement and main- in it, and make love in it, and we shall die in it”; it is “one of tenance of a national English heri- tage through the medium of what Heaven’s choice blessings.”11 might be delicately termed English Recuperating Shakespeare for scholarly study served to assert letters” (p. 30). not only Anglo-Saxon cultural authority in the face of menacing populations brought up outside England’s orbit but also the social authority of those members of the upper classes for whom THE FURNESS MEMORIAL LIBRARY 65
scholarship was “natural.” Shakespeare has had a long—and to 10 Instances that document the ex- some a distressing—career as a “low” or popular author.12 Furness tent of such anxieties are legion. Sr. embarked on, and Furness Jr. continued, a project that The heroine of Gene Stratton-Por- ter’s The Keeper of the Bees (Garden demanded both education and leisure unattainable outside the City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925), confines of the social class they represented. Their work helped to for just one example, is a teacher of make their chosen author a symbol of cultural authority. It also “Americanism” in California ele- turned him into a kind of “property” of those with the means as mentary schools. Neither the char- acter nor the author exhibits any well as the ability properly to appreciate and interpret him.13 doubt that this subject is both ap- The Furnesses, their project, and their library are not re- propriate and necessary. ducible, however, to mere symptoms of the “Victorian frame of mind” or of their period’s political, cultural, and social anxiet- ies. Neither scholarship nor collecting is an especially common 11 Horace Howard Furness, Sr., phenomenon. In turning their attentions to the creation of a to Edward T. Steel, President variorum Shakespeare and then acquiring the bibliographical of the Board of Education of Philadelphia; quoted in J. W. resources, the library, to make it possible, father and son both Bright, “English in the High demonstrated character traits unusual in their own or in any Schools,” MLN, 1:7 (November other period. Bristol comments on the “atypicality” of the Fur- 1886), cols. 216-219. James M. ness collecting program and stresses the “substantive intellectual” Gibson offers a contextualized account of the circumstances out role their collection played in their lives.14 Almost despite himself of which this letter emerged in (for he is critical of what he regards as the socially and politically The Philadelphia Shakespeare Story: regressive milieu out of which the Furness project emerged), Horace Howard Furness and the New Bristol is impressed by their achievements. Variorum Shakespeare (New York: The Furnesses, especially Furness Sr., with whom the New AMS Press, 1990), pp. 151-152. The chapter of which these pages Variorum and the library both began, have attracted considerable are part (“The Penn Years,” pp. attention. They have been the objects of several works of hom- 131-160) presents Furness as an mage as well as scholarly and biographical studies. Among the active and important agent in first was a pamphlet reprinting memorials from two national pe- educational reform of both the riodicals, Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness. Our Great Shake- Philadelphia public schools and the University of Pennsylvania. A speare Critic, by Talcott Williams. From The Century Magazine, No- major force in the transformation vember, 1912. Horace Howard Furness, by Agnes Repplier. From The of the University into a modern Atlantic Monthly, November, 1912 (Cleveland: Privately printed, research institution, he was also, 1912).15 Printed as a Christmas greeting, the pamphlet suggests of course, a major factor in the modernization of Penn’s Library the national stature which both Furness and Shakespearian specifically. Gibson discusses his scholarship had attained by the time of his death. Ten years later, role in the erection of the Furness Sr.’s grandson, Horace Howard Furness Jayne, saw two University’s new library building volumes of Furness Sr.’s Letters (1922), embedded in the context (now the Fisher Fine Arts Library). of a long biographical summary, into print. James M. Gibson, His long service (1881-1904) on Penn’s library committee also who in the mid-1980s discussed Furness Sr. as a “book collector involved him in a host of other and library builder,”16 published a monograph on the history of library-related matters, intellectual Furness and the New Variorum in 1990.17 as well as bricks-and-mortar (Philadelphia Shakespeare Story, pp. 145-149). Research-driven AS IT MAY be pieced together from these and other sources (including the manuscripts that survive as part of the Furness 66 THE PENN LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AT 250
Memorial Library and document its history), the Furness story is modernization processes were in one sense simple to recount. In November of 1860, Furness increasingly characteristic of Sr., then a young man of twenty-seven, joined the Shakspere American institutions of higher education in Furness’ era. Burton J. 18 Society of Philadelphia. “The earliest formally established Bledstein provides background on organization devoted to the study of Shakespeare’s plays, older the nature of educational and social even than the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft,” Bristol writes, change in the late nineteenth- and the Society was characterized by an “avocational and leisure early twentieth-century American class orientation,” an “exclusive character,” and “elaborate university—change that, in Philadelphia’s local scene, Furness banquets.” Its meetings were held in a member’s law offices; helped to implement at Penn—in Furness himself was a lawyer, as were many other members. As The Culture of Professionalism: The might be expected, meetings exhibited “a vigorous forensic and Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New argumentative character.”19 “It constantly happened,” Furness York: Norton, 1976). himself wrote, “that we spent a whole evening [arguing] over a difficult passage . . . only to find that the whole question had been discussed and settled by learned men elsewhere.” Such 12 This subject has been studied in belated discoveries came despite recourse to the 1821 Variorum the American context by Lawrence already in existence (of which “every member had a copy”). W. Levine, “William Shakespeare in America,” Highbrow/Lowbrow: The The failures of that volume to resolve issues, because of its age Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in and its inadequacies, encouraged Furness to consider creating his America (Cambridge, Mass.: Har- own variorum: vard University Press, 1988), pp. 11-81. See now Thomas Cartelli’s critique of Levine, “Nativism, Na- . . . the idea of a New Variorum edition of Shakespeare grew tionalism, and the Common Man directly out of our needs in the Society. Every member had in American Constructions of a copy of the Variorum of 1821 [but everything that had Shakespeare,” in Cartelli’s Repo- been published since then remained “scattered” in many sitioning Shakespeare: National For- different publications]. . . . [I]t dawned on us that if we mations, Postcolonial Appropriations (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. were to pursue our studies with any of the ardor of original 27-45. research we should exactly know all that had been said or suggested by our predecessors. It was nigh fifty years since the publication of the last Variorum and the time seemed 13 The anxieties of class, with spe- ripe for a new one.20 cific reference to the Philadelphia milieu in which the Furnesses lived and worked, are explored by E. When, in 1866, the Society began to discuss Romeo and Juliet, Digby Baltzell in some seminal, Furness began to compile the first volume of his New Variorum as if controversial, studies. These in- an outgrowth of the Society’s study of that play. He had already clude Philadelphia Gentlemen: The begun to “experiment” with a variorum during the summer of Making of a National Upper Class 1862, in preparation for the Shakspere Society’s upcoming study (1958; rpt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), where of Hamlet. It had taken him a while, however, to realize the value the Furnesses (not always correctly of turning this private project into a public one.21 Working on named) make a few cameo appear- Romeo and Juliet, Furness relied for the progress of his work on ances (pp. 217, 219, et seq.); and Pu- the Society’s own reference collection, which included books ritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of now considered “rare.” He also borrowed, where necessary, from Class Authority and Leadership (New other collections. Among them was that of the Shakespearian THE FURNESS MEMORIAL LIBRARY 67
actor and theatrical impresario Edwin Forrest. (Large portions of York: Free Press, 1979), where the both the Society’s and Forrest’s collections now sit alongside the Furnesses again appear in cameo Furness Memorial Library in Penn’s Annenberg Rare Book and roles (p. 328, et seq.). In the very different Philadelphia—far Manuscript Library.) And, of course, he used his own books. more satisfied; far less “anxious”— These already included a copy of the Fourth Folio (1685). portrayed by John Lukacs in Phil- The completed variorum Romeo and Juliet returned to Furness adelphia: Patricians and Philistines, in published form a bit more than four years later, in January of 1900-1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), Furness 1871. By then, however, the major change in his circumstances Sr. is depicted (briefly) as part of of life had occurred: the death of his father-in-law, Evan Rogers. the city’s intellectual élite (p. 132). Rogers left Furness a token bequest of $10,000. To his daughter, A note in which Agnes Repplier, Helen Kate Rogers Furness, however, he left a trust fund valued also associated with that élite, is at over $750,000. Evan Rogers’ bequest to Kate Furness gave overheard complaining to A. Ed- ward Newton about Furness’ “as- his son-in-law the economic means that enabled him to leave toundingly prudish wife” (ibid., n. the practice of law and turn himself into a professional man 159) reinforces a sense that anxiet- of letters.22 ies of many different kinds must Furness himself might have objected to the word “professional” have underlain both work and life. The most extensive consideration in this context. After all, both his serious interest in Shakespeare of the Furness project in relation to and his project to create a New Variorum arose out of the context the social and political interests and of a gentleman’s club and its debates. Such a context implies anxieties its formation reflects is certain qualities of leisure and class standing to which notions of found in Bristol, Shakespeare’s Amer- professionalism are not entirely natural. Indeed, the traditions of ica, pp. 64-70. Tom Lutz provides useful background about the varied disinterested scholarly amateurism evoked by this context imply sources of cultural and social stress a capacity easily to sustain unremunerative researches. Dependent that produced such American anxi- therefore upon one’s prior social and economic standing, amateur- ety in American Nervousness, 1903: ism is at the very least different from, if not completely antitheti- An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y.: cal to, the labors by which mere professionals achieve standing. Cornell University Press, 1991). No matter. Professionally or otherwise, Furness was now able to make Shakespeare his vocation. The size of Evan Rogers’ bequest 14 Shakespeare’s America, p. 65. enabled Furness also to build the kind of library that would provide his Shakespearian project with the essential bibliographi- 15 The pamphlet was printed by cal base it demanded. Cleveland librarians in memory of Furness Sr. entered into the collecting of Shakespearian materi- the then recently deceased Phila- delphia Shakespearian (“Greetings als at the right moment, if a correspondent reprinted in the pages from the Librarian and the Vice- of Shakespeariana—“Mr. J. H. Slater writing in The Athenæum of Librarians to their associates in the the ‘Book Sales of 1887’”—may be believed: Cleveland Public Library and the Western Reserve Library School. Christmas 1912”). Shakespeare is not, curiously enough, a popular author from the collector’s point of view. The early quartos, of course, sell well on the rare occasions on which they appear, and the first four folios excite a certain amount of interest, though not so much now as formerly. During the whole of 1887 only one quarto was offered for competition, viz., the Romeo and Juliet of 1637, and this was so imperfect that it 68 THE PENN LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AT 250
THE. TRAGEDIE OF HAMLET, Prince ofDenmarke.
dfltu Primus. ; Sccena·Prima.
I Wb,re now it ~urnes, ,11,.,,,tt,,, and my {.tf,, ' The Bell then beating on,. '11-••• v'lf,r. Ptaco,brcake 1hce of: E#ttr ,bl (j6!/, ■Ho's there i Looke where 1t comes againc. Er,,,,. Nay anfwcr me: SlllPd llt •nfold \ BATri, In the fame figure, like the King that's dftd, your fclft. I M ,r. Thou art a Scholler; fpuke t<>lt H.,,,.;,. JJ,a-. Long liue the King. Bun. Lookes it not lokt1he King? Marke it Hor.,,,,. Fr,a,, BU#trrtU 1 HorA. Moll like: It hmowes me wi1h f
The title-page of Furness’ copy of the “1608” Lear quarto (actually printed in 1619).
Opposite page: The first page of Hamlet, from Furness’ copy of the 1623 First Folio.
16 “Horace Howard Furness: Book Collector and Library Builder,” in Shakespeare Study Today: The Horace Howard Furness Memorial Lectures, ed. Georgianna Ziegler (New York: AMS Press, 1986), pp. 169-189 (hereafter cited as “Book Collec- tor”). I must take this opportunity to record my gratitude to Dr. Ziegler for her assistance in the preparation of this essay.
17 Philadelphia Shakespeare Story (above, n. 11).
18 On the background to the So- ciety’s peculiar spelling practices (“Shakspere”)—still, as of the year 2000, retained—see Stavisky, pp. 26-27, 56. For the date at which Furness joined the Society, I rely on Gibson, “Book Collector,” p. 170; Furness himself, however, gave the date as “1858 or 1859” (in “How Did You Become a Shake- speare Student?” Shakespeariana, 5, no. 58 [October 1888], 439).
19 Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, pp. only realized a little over 2l. On the other hand, a copy of 64-65. Shakespeare’s First Folio, measuring 13-3/8 in. by 8-3/4 in. was knocked down at the Hartley sale for 255l., and another 20 “How Did You Become a Shake- copy at the Brice sale for 105l. . . . Seventeen from among speare Student?” pp. 439-440. Three the numerous modern versions of the great dramatist’s works variorum editions of Shakespeare preceded Furness’: “Isaac Reed’s were offered for sale, and many of them on difforent [sic] editions of Johnson and Steevens in occasions; the bidding, however, was feeble, and at times 1803 and 1813 and James Boswell appeared likely to die altogether of inanition. It is quite the younger’s edition of Malone’s evident that the popular taste does not for the moment Shakespeare in 1821” (Gibson, Phila- delphia Shakespeare Story, p. 61). centre on Shakespeare.23 70 THE PENN LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AT 250
The prices Slater reports reflect prices Furness actually paid. His 21 Gibson, Philadelphia Shakespeare (somewhat imperfect) First Folio (1623) cost Furness £160; his Story, pp. 59-60, et seq. Second Folio (1632) £37; his Third Folio (1664) £77. Another copy of the Fourth Folio (he already owned a copy when he 22 Evan’s son, Fairman Rogers, began work on Romeo and Juliet) came to him for £12. Other was another beneficary of his will. editions of Shakespeare’s works (among them Pope’s, Johnson’s, Thus, albeit indirectly and only af- ter his death, Evan Rogers was and Malone’s) reached him for the same sorts of prices. The ten to become a double benefactor of volumes of Malone’s great 1790 edition, for instance, set Furness Penn’s Libraries. Not only did his back a solid £1.15s. The Hamlet quarto of 1611 cost him £33. gifts help to build Furness’ Shake- Three 1619 Pavier quartos, printed with false imprint dates by speare library. They also paved the way for one of the great treasures Jaggard, cost £145: the “1600” Merchant of Venice, the “1608” of the Library of Penn’s School King Lear (with manuscript notes by the eighteenth-century edi- of Veterinary Medicine at New tor Edward Capell), and the “1608” Henry V.24 With all due Bolton, the Fairman Rogers Col- allowance for changes in the value of money since the second lection of Books on the Horse and half of the nineteenth century, such prices remain very nearly Equitation. Claire Gilbride Fox has published a catalog of the collec- astonishing to contemplate today. But they made it possible for tion under that title, with a short Furness to build, relatively quickly, an exceptionally effective biography of Fairman Rogers, for working library, one that intelligently combined older and more the School (Philadelphia, 1975). modern materials in several languages. In this building process, Furness began by seeking the assistance 23 “Miscellany. Shakespeare and the of James Orchard Halliwell (later Halliwell-Phillipps), an English Book Collectors,” Shakespeariana, antiquarian, book collector, and scholar with an interest in the 5, no. 58 (October 1888), 385-386. literature of Shakespeare’s period. He also bought regularly from the London bookseller Alfred Russell Smith, to whom Halliwell 24 Gibson, “Book Collector,” pp. referred him. Smith, acting as Furness’ agent, bought for him at 173-174. auction, as well. Furness also dealt with Albert Cohn in Berlin and had a bookseller in Paris. Gibson calculates that, during the 1870s, Furness spent more than $8,500 on his Shakespearian acquisitions. Although prices are difficult to compare between different eras, a comparison between Furness’ costs and those of another collector with whom he overlapped may help clarify what such a sum meant in the 1870s. In 1847, James Lenox had bought a Gutenberg Bible, the first copy to come to the United States. The price Lenox paid for it, about $3,000, was considered “mad.”25 25 Henry Stevens, Recollections of The expenditure of nearly three times as much money on Shake- James Lenox and the Formation of speare a mere three decades later is unlikely to have struck Fur- his Library, ed. Victor Hugo Paltsits (New York: The New York Public ness’ contemporaries as particularly clever. Furness himself notes, Library, 1951), pp. 22-23. however, just how expensive the process of building an adequate library for literary study can be. “Eight thousand dollars would [not] be more than adequate,” he says, referring to what it would cost a purchaser to acquire the materials on a list of basic literary- historical series. Then he adds that, having “lately been entrusted with the expenditure of one thousand dollars in this department THE FURNESS MEMORIAL LIBRARY 71
[i.e., literature] for the Philadelphia Library[,] . . . I therefore know how very little way that sum goes—ten times this sum will have to be expended” to create a serious “English Department” for that library.26 26 Furness, Letters, I:265-266. The collection Furness built did not simply gather in the sorts of Shakespearian high spots already mentioned, however, nor did he restrict acquisitions to English-language publications only. Georgianna Ziegler, a former Curator of the Furness Memorial Library, has written that “Furness himself purchased a number of French and German editions of Shakespeare and was an avid collector of German scholarship, whether in the form of notes, articles, or books.”27 German-language scholarship continues to 27 Ziegler, “The Horace Howard be a strong feature of the Furness Memorial. As Shakespeare Furness Memorial Library,” Jahr- studies have expanded to other language areas, the collection has buch / Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesell- schaft West, 121 (1985), 267. continued to try to keep pace with this expansion, although the effort resembles Cuchulain’s fight with the sea. Translations of Shakespearian texts into non-English languages are another feature of the collection originating in Furness’ collecting habits. Translations now come not only from western Europe, however, but also—to cite only a very few of very many possible exam- ples—from Russia, Korea, and Tanzania. Ziegler also remarks that “theatre was a great passion of Furness’s, in spite of his deafness, and,” she continues,
he fostered friendships with such actors and actresses as Fanny Kemble, Edwin Booth, Ellen Terry, Julia Marlowe, Helena Faucit Martin, E. H. Sothern, and Johnston Forbes- Robinson. The library contains correspondence, memora- bilia, drawings or photographs of all these theatre people, in addition to a number of nineteenth-century playbills from Philadelphia, New York, and London. There are also a number of prompt books, including two by Edwin Booth made specially for Furness, who was one of the first Shake- speare editors to include comments by actors and actresses in his notes.28 28 Ziegler, “The Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library,” p. 267. This point about Furness’ collecting patterns, and the ways in which his scholarship reflects them, is particularly worth remark- ing. Stavisky suggests that the major weakness of nineteenth- century Shakespearian scholarship in general is its ignorance of, and disdain for, the stage.29 If he is right that such attitudes were 29 See Stavisky, chap. 4, “The indeed a general weakness of the era, then in this respect not only Limiting Factor,” pp. 109-121. the collection but also Furness himself were both far in advance Here he remarks: “a great 72 THE PENN LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AT 250
An engraving after the 1755 painting by Pieter Van Bleeck, “Mrs. Cibber in the Character of Cordelia” (n.d.; from the Furness Memorial Library). The scene depicts Cordelia and Arante on the heath, rescued by Edgar from attackers—a scene from Nahum Tate’s revision of King Lear that appears nowhere in Shakespeare’s play.
weakness of Victorian Shakespeare criticism” is that “the criticism of their time. Fortunately, stage history is a topic that the various is simply not dramatic. . . . Curators of the Furness Memorial have made a special effort to The Victorians were the last print-oriented generation before develop. Assisted by the proximity of allied theater history hold- the electronic innovations in ings in other divisions of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manu- communications restored the script Library, they have managed to keep the Furness Library a importance of seeing and hearing strong resource in this field. via movies and the phonograph— hence, a lack of respect for the Kate Rogers Furness died in 1883 while Furness was already stage and a misunderstanding of at work on the New Variorum Othello. For more than a year the more fluid, oral tradition following Kate’s death, the entire variorum project ground to a in Elizabethan culture” (pp. halt as Furness tried to cope with his grief. Although he eventu- 110-111). But “lack of respect for ally completed the volume (it appeared in 1886), Furness was the stage” is one of the things noticeably not a characteristic of never able to endure thinking about or reading Othello, so closely the collection built, or of the associated had the play become for him with the trauma of his commentary written, by Furness. THE FURNESS MEMORIAL LIBRARY 73
The title-page of the Furness copy of Arthur Golding’s 1567 transla- tion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one The. xv. Booke of Shakespeare’s main sources. of P. Ouidius N afoj entytuled Metamorphofis, tranflated oute of · Latininto8nyJifhmeeter,bdr.. · thur Golding Gentleman., A workc very pleafaunt 11,iddeuUJJk. ,With OtilfJJced&",and iudgcmcnt,this workc muR: he rca4 1 Forclfc to the Reader itftandcsinfmalltl:cad~
linprynted at London, by . W,ll,11m Swes.
wife’s death. Another consequence of her death, however, was to have an impact on the history of his library. Under the terms of Evan Rogers’ bequest, ownership of the family home in Philadelphia’s Washington Square passed from Furness to his old- est son. By 1894, Furness had decided to turn Lindenshade, a summer home in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, into a year-round residence. He gave the building a fireproof addition to house what was by then a collection of between seven and eight thousand books.30 30 Gibson, “Book Collector,” p. 184. 74 THE PENN LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AT 250
This addition makes clear that, by 1894, the library was 31 Ziegler, “Introduction,” already about two-thirds of the size it would attain in 1931. In Shakespeare Study Today, p. 4. that year, the will of Furness Jr. (he had died in 1930) transferred About Furness Jr. far less has been written than about his father. 31 ownership to the University of Pennsylvania. Furness Jr. made Clearly Sr. was not only the the gift in honor of his father. (The Furness Memorial Library’s originating but also the directing “official” opening date at Penn was celebrated on Shakespeare’s hand in both the New Variorum “birthday,” April 23, 1932.) Numbering about 12,000 volumes project and creation of the library on which the variorum was based. on opening day, 32 the collection has more than doubled in In presenting that library to the size since it was placed, along with a $100,000 endowment, University in commemoration of in Penn’s care. A succession of Curators and Penn faculty mem- his father, Jr. was attempting to bers—Matthew W. Black, Matthias A. Shaaber, Roland M. assign credit where it was due. Frye, and Georgianna Ziegler, successively, all of them assisted On Jr., see DAB (7:79), an article by George Harvey Genzmer of by Dr. William E. Miller—followed the Furness’ tradition of slightly surprising candor. Furness scholarly librarianship in continuing to build the collection. Jr., the second of Kate and Sr.’s Their own active work as scholars and teachers, of Tudor and children, was educated at Harvard Stuart literature generally and of Shakespeare specifically, gave (Class of 1888), took additional each of them unusually deep understanding of the needs of the work in music and astronomy at Penn, and, in 1891, became Furness Memorial’s wide collecting scope. an instructor in physics at Philadelphia’s Episcopal Academy. Ten years later, by then the THE COLLECTION is indeed impressive. Even from opening day, students or scholars who wanted to read or examine various edi- author of a laboratory manual used in schools, he gave up teaching tions of Shakespeare would have had their choice of almost every to assist his father as co-editor contemporary or later edition. Where originals were unavailable of the New Variorum. Following (only two copies of the first “bad” quarto of Hamlet survive, for his father’s death in 1912, he example, and both seem to be unattainable for love or money), succeeded him as project editor. the collection provided facsimiles. That policy was imaginatively He was “unknown as a scholar” when he joined forces with his extended under Frye’s Curatorship, when Furness and the Uni- father, says DAB, and “news of versity Libraries collaborated in 1967 to acquire hardcopy print- the arrangement was received with outs, not just microfilms, of all books, pamphlets, and broadsides some misgiving.” Although printed before 1641 in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and interested parties suggested, when Sr. died, that a “committee of in the English language from the Continent of Europe. scholars” take on the task of Scholarship, of course, is copiously represented, and, as has completing the variorum, Jr. already been indicated, in many languages. So are lexical and himself continued with it “as an historical works of reference, and, in addition, the context out act of filial piety, with noble of which Shakespeare wrote: his sources and his contemporaries. purpose and laborious industry. In general, the volumes that he To concentrate for the moment on these sources and contem- edited were well received, but the poraries, readers will find, among much else, early editions most careful reviews of his work of Chaucer and Spenser; North’s translation of Plutarch; the revealed numerous errors and chronicle histories of Hall, Holinshed, and Grafton; Golding’s shortcomings.” A stark summary concludes the article: “it is clear translation of Ovid; John Florio’s Firste Fruites and his translation that in learning, critical judgment, of Montaigne; Montemayor’s Diana; Thomas Newton’s transla- originality, and mastery of detail tions of Seneca; the Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Killi- he was not the equal of his grew dramatic folios; Bandello’s Histoires tragiques; Cinthio’s De THE FURNESS MEMORIAL LIBRARY 75
gli hecatommithi (now cataloged as by Giraldi). Even this very father. It was his good fortune brief list begins to suggest some important points about how to be the son and pupil of the the Furnesses built their collection and how it functions in its greatest of Shakespeare’s editors, his misfortune that he must stand present context. comparison with him.” The Furnesses understood that Shakespeare, English cultural icon though he might be, wrote within a European and not simply an insular English literary and cultural context. That his 32 Ziegler, “The Horace Howard sources have for a long time been well-known to include tales Furness Memorial Library,” p. 265. derived from Seneca, Plautus, Bandello, and Cinthio, among oth- ers, makes such a sense of Shakespeare inevitable. Accordingly, the collection has actively pursued Shakespeare’s sources wherever they may be found, even when these sources were found outside the arenas favored by the Furnesses’ cultural concerns. From the collection’s earliest days, the Furnesses sought out and acquired for it materials that are not at all “obvious.” One example alone will have to suffice: Pierre Boaistuau’s two-volume Histoires prodigieuses, extraictes de plusieurs fameux autheurs, Grecs et Latins, sacrez et prophanes . . . (Paris: Chez Jean de Bordeaux, 1574). To begin with, this is in fact a “rare book”: I find no record of another library in the United States with this edition of Boaistuau. More importantly, Boaistuau—unlike, say, Plautus, Plutarch, Cinthio, or Holinshed—is not a common name on every scholar’s list of the ten (or even of the hundred) most interesting sources of Shakespeare’s plays. Not only are his works not “obvi- ous” for a Shakespeare-oriented collection but also one could even call them “obscure.” What is this book doing here? Yet it is a Furness purchase (whether Sr.’s or Jr.’s I do not know). Two small octavo volumes, illustrated, Boaistuau’s book retails a set of stories in a genre we might nowadays term “unnatural natural history.” Library catalogers assign to it terms such as “curiosities,” “wonders,” “marvels,” and the “supernatural.” Boaistuau has gath- ered and published a variety of tales, all basically intended to excite, titillate, and horrify his audience. The reader finds, for instance, a story of “the marvelous history of the dogs who ate Christians” (1:fols. 79-81). It is followed immediately by “the amazing history of the diverse figures, among them comets, dragons, and flames, that have appeared in the heavens, with the terror of the people who saw them and an analysis of the causes and occasions to which they have been assigned” (fols. 81-88). Shakespearian sources? Hardly. Yet anyone who has ever wondered what Romeo means when he cries, “then I defy you, stars!”—or Cassius when, in Julius Caesar, he says, “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings”—or 76 THE PENN LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AT 250
Hamlet, when he promises to “defy augury”—might find the second of these two of Boaistuau’s chapters informative. More- over, these little volumes add to the ability of students and scholars to understand the varied ways in which stories worked in Shakespeare’s era. Precisely because Boaistuau’s book is not an obvious Shakespearian “source,” its presence in the Furness collection throws a striking light on the sheer imagination that went into forming the library. Moreover, when a source is not present in the Furness library, it may often be found in the other special collections with which the Furness Memorial is now associated. Thus, for example, early editions of Saxo Grammaticus, a source for Hamlet, and both the 1534 editio princeps and Amyot’s French translation of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, a locus classicus for the form of romance that Shakespeare used both in his comedies and in his romances, can be found in the Forrest and Rare Book collections. Readers may use them as easily as they use materials from the Furness Memorial itself. Even collections that may seem completely remote from interests supported by the Furness Memorial prove not to be as remote as might be supposed. In a time when studies of Renaissance “chemical theater” and the influence of neoplatonic and hermetic magical thinkers on Renaissance English drama flourish, both the Edgar Fahs Smith Library, on the history of chemistry, and the Henry Charles Lea Library, with its heavy collection of materials in the history of early modern occultism, provide materials that effectively expand the range of research that the Furness Memo- rial can support. Books and literary manuscripts were not the only materials that entered the library. Numerous “relics”33 remain part of the 33 This is Gibson’s word (“Book collection. One may still visit the skull “used for many years at Collector,” p. 174). the Walnut Street Theatre in Hamlet[, g]iven to Furness by S. Weir Mitchell . . . [and bearing] the names of Kean, Macready, Kemble, Booth, Forrest, Cushman, Davenport, Murdock, and Brooks, all of whom had [as Hamlet] addressed it as poor Yorick’s last remains.”34 (In the mid 1990s, this skull left the repose of 34 Gibson, “Book Collector,” p. 175. the Furness Memorial for yet another dramatic airing, playing Vindice’s poisoned mistress in a student production of Cyril Tourneur’s Jacobean bloodbath, The Revenger’s Tragedy. The Fur- ness Memorial supports use of all its contents!) Also visible are “the Shakespeare gloves given to Furness on January 17, 1874, by Fanny Kemble to show her appreciation of the Variorum Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. . . . [The gloves] had surfaced at Stratford in 1769 at the time of Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee.” Their THE FURNESS MEMORIAL LIBRARY 77
provenance made them allegedly “the only property that remains” The skull used for many years at that had once belonged to Shakespeare.35 Statuary, photographs, Philadelphia’s Walnut Street The- paintings, drawings, prints, model Elizabethan playhouses, theater atre to represent Yorick in produc- tions of Hamlet, now in the Furness costumes: the Furness Memorial is awash not only in books and Memorial Library. manuscripts but also in sheer stuff. All of it helps to document the ways in which Shakespeare has been presented, received, and interpreted over time. 35 Gibson, “Book Collector,” pp. The point of all these books and all this stuff—it is, in fact, the 175-176. A gift from Mrs. Ruth true legacy of the Furness gift—is the pedagogical and scholarly Molloy to the Furness Memorial of a very nearly identical pair of work the Furness Memorial makes possible. The quantity, oc- gloves with a comparable prove- casionally even the existence of that work, owes much to the nance came at the end of the 1990s. collection’s wealth of resources. Undergraduates and graduate As welcome as the original pair, it students, faculty, and visiting scholars all use Furness. Most of is not, on the other hand, conducive the sources cited in this survey were written by people who to a powerful deal of confidence in the authenticity of either. have used Furness. The MLA editors who continue Furness’s New 78 THE PENN LIBRARY COLLECTIONS AT 250
Variorum also use his collection regularly. So comfortable and so well-stocked a place is it in which to work that graduate students who now have finished their studies and teach in places distant from Philadelphia come back at the holidays or for summers to use Furness’ resources. In the last few years, a program imaginatively conceived and directed by Professor of English Rebecca Bushnell and Director of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library Michael Ryan has begun to seek new venues for the col- lection. By taking advantage of digital technologies and the worldwide web, their project will make the Furness Memorial a powerful educational tool even for those who cannot visit it in Philadelphia. With funding from the National Endow- ment for the Humanities that builds on gifts from Lawrence Schoenberg (for whom the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image is named), the Furness Memorial Library has begun to mount the collection’s original materials in scanned facsimiles on its freely accessible website. Original materials that readers were once compelled to consult in person, or use in modern editions, or in often extremely expensive printed facsimiles, are now accessible to anyone with a reasonably good computer and access to the internet. Part of this project would have been of particular interest to the Horace Howard Furness who concerned himself with the literature curricula of secondary schools in his own era (see note 11). Seeking to reach not only college- and university-level students, the on- line Shakespeare venture has also sought to join with teachers at Philadelphia and regional secondary schools both public and private in an effort to make the Furness Memorial’s resources even more widely used than has until now been the case. The collection continues to grow. Faculty and student input continues to be high, and library attention also contributes nota- bly to the Furness Memorial’s flourishing condition. In 1999, the Furness Memorial and the Library again cooperated on an acquisition that, like Frye’s of the hardcopy printouts of all English books printed before 1641, would make study and research easier for Furness users. The materials that Frye had once obtained in hardcopy are now becoming available on the worldwide web. On the web they will eventually cover a far more extensive range of dates (1475 to 1800) than Frye was able to acquire. In December of 1999, the Library moved to acquire this resource for its users, for which some materials in the Furness Memorial itself will be scanned. THE FURNESS MEMORIAL LIBRARY 79
The day is fast coming when the Furness Memorial will have lived longer at Penn than it did as a private library, first in Washington Square and then in Lindenshade. That its collections remain useful, that study and appreciation continue of the author to whom their acquisition was devoted, would surely please, though it would not surprise, both father and son. That the collection is also being used actively to seek out new students and new audiences might surprise them. Perhaps they would find it difficult to approve the extension and dissemination of their scholarly resources beyond the limited circle in and for which they themselves began their work. But perhaps not. They did, after all, broadcast the fruit of their own labors by publishing it. Over the course of his life, Furness Sr. turned himself from a retiring private into an outgoing public figure. An embodiment of Shakespearian scholarship and of the civic significance of “the life of the mind,” he found fame as a reader of Shakespeare and as an orator.36 Furness Jr. gave away 36 See Gibson, “The Public Years,” their project’s bibliographical basis, their library, to a University, Philadelphia Shakespeare Story, pp. along with an endowment to help insure its continued growth. 198-224, for the details of this only partly surprising denouement to One imagines that their love for Shakespeare would finally bring Furness’ career. the Furnesses to enthusiastic support of the ways in which the library they created is now engaged not only in finding new audi- ences for itself but also in bringing new audiences to Shakespeare. That these resources can be used in such ways is a tribute to the acumen with which the Furnesses began building their collection, and to the civic generosity that, by giving it to Penn, makes such use possible. It is a collection that Penn has been privileged to continue building, a collection that generations of users have felt privileged to enjoy.